Working to change our understanding of mental health disorders and the approach to treating them.
Working to reduce stigma and promote acceptance.
Teaching positive ways to a better life and mind, to a better mind and life.

Friday, July 24, 2015

Neuroscience in Focus - An Introduction to Neuroplasticity

Neuroscience
in Focus:

An Introduction to Neuroplasticity

I
cannot tell you what a dark and hopeless state I was in at the end of
2012 and I won't describe here the full extent of that state and
why.

But
I started the year of 2013 full of fresh hope in looking for answers
to my severe neurospsychiatric disorder(s) and the several years of
hell it/they had put me through. As regular readers know, I took up
studying neuroscience and it was not long into that study that I came
across the concept of neuroplasticity.

Probably
because I was able to approach the study of the brain with such a
"blank slate", and thus did not have to trouble myself with
"unlearning" a lot of decades and centuries old outdated
(and flat out wrong) notions that clog up the brains of so many older
generation scientists and doctors (and, ahem, psychiatrists and
psychologists), I immediately grasped the enormity of the
possibilities for healing brains (and thus psychiatric disorders)
using the principals of neuroplasticity.

I
can honestly say that no other event in my long and eventful life
gave me such a tectonic shift in life perspective than did the
discovery of and grasping of neuroplasticity (okay, I'd better make
it Number Two and put the birth of my daughter at Number One).

Even
though it was discovered nearly forty years ago, the term
neuroplasticity is still kind of a sexy new kid on the block term
that's become quite trendy to throw around in the "brain biz"
(especially by those flogging brain training games - though
I introduce in this post my own very popular Brad's
Brain Training Exercises that
are more specifically designed for what us mental health peeps must
work on). The problem is that few people really understand what it
means and the full implications of what neuroplastic activity means
in the brain and for human behaviour.

There
are numerous aspects to neuroplasticity and how it works in the brain
and what this means but I'm just going to introduce a few of the
basics for our purposes today.

Very briefly for, what it means to you and whatever condition you currently find yourself in is that however your brain is
right now - and I don't care how "messed up" you think it
is - it does NOT have
to stay that way. Yes, your brain - and thus your habits, your
reactions, your intelligence, your memory capacity and yes,
your "zombie
programs" -
can be changed. The very wiring and programming of it can be changed.
And thus YOU can change.

Neuroplasticity
is how your brain responds to catastrophic injury and heals itself
(like a stroke in which entire brain regions will cease to exist
because of full neuronal death due to oxygen starvation).

And
neuroplasticity is the key to how you're going to change your brain
and thus your behaviour(s), thoughts, responses, emotions and and
many (if not all) of the symptoms related to whatever it is you may
be suffering from. It is - or at least could be - the key to how you
can change everything about your life (and no, this is not a feel
good corny phrase to blow smoke up your ass and make you feel like
you're dancing on sunshine (as we'll see as we go along)).

However,
we're also going to see how the same principles of
neuroplasticity are responsible for most (though not all) of the
things you don't like about yourself. This is what some call the
"dark side to neuroplasticity". I touch on this in many posts but will at some point get to a specific post on it.

Understanding
the basics of neuroplasticity and how the brain adapts itself to
conditions within you and around you is, I'll argue, one of the most
important fundamentals in understanding human behaviour and most
psychiatric and mood disorders. It is the basis for both how we
improve and learn and for how we "go downhill"
when we experience mental health problems. Solidly establishing my
argument is going to take far, far more than we can get to today so
for now we're just going to have a very brief look at what the term
means and what's going on in your brain.

Okay,
so lets have a little bit of a (very) basic look at how it works and
why. At its most fundamental level, it is really just basic cellular biology. All cells are capable of various structural and functional change in order to adapt to environmental conditions. This is literally how evolution works. This is how all life on earth works. So what brain researchers refer to as "neuroplasticity" is simply how cells in the brain - hence "neuro" - can change and adapt; hence "plasticity", which simply means to be "malleable" which simply means "changeable" in the same fundamental sense that all living cells can change and adapt. Of course, as I fervently hope regular readers are beginning to understand, in the human brain this is a rather more complex process, to say the least. In fact, much recent research has found that human brains have mechanisms for neuroplastic change either not found in any other species or which function at higher and more important levels. It has been argued that these unique forms of neuroplastic change in the human brain are chiefly responsible for our soaring rate of evolution over the past several tens of thousands of years (no other species has ever evolved and adapted so rapidly as home sapiens).Now, all that tedium aside, let's now take a better look at what all this means in our human noggins and what it means for you and turning your life around.

Firstly,
back to some basic neuroanatomy. Remember Neuroanatomy
101?
Okay, probably not (I'd suggest rereading it for the fun of it but
it's okay if you don't).

First
of all, you have in the neighbourhood of eighty-six billion
of these:

Those
are neurons and as we saw in Neuroanatomy 101, neurons "store
stuff"; all the tiny little fragments of details of everything
you are seeing, thinking, remembering, hearing, feeling and so on are
stored in neurons. Now, those tiny little details in each neuron
are of no use if a given neuron's particular set of details
cannot pass its information off to neighbouring or task related
neurons (to contribute to making bigger pictures, thoughts, words,
images, ideas and all that stuff and getting it into broader
networks). That happens through the axon (the longer branch you see
coloured in yellow and sheathed in myelin and the axon terminals
which are connected at neighbouring neurons' dendrites (those shorter
spiky looking branches). The actual "hand off" of
information happens in the synapses via a nifty little neurochemical
transactions.

So
our thoughts and various kinds of memories, being able to place names
to faces, to be able to assemble pictures in our minds and countless
so on are the results of billions of tiny packets of information in
neurons being connected through wiring and synaptic connections
working together in localized and brain wide networks to make up the
bigger "pictures" or thoughts, ideas, concepts, etc.

Follow
so far? So those synaptic connections between neighbouring neurons
(and even far flung neurons, some of their axons are very long) are
really, really important. And while the neurons are permanent (for
the most part), the connections are not. The connections and
dendrites can be and will be "pruned back" - or perhaps
rebuilt and rearranged all throughout our lives depending on various
internal and external experiences.

This
is a very, very crude diagram but it serves well enough for us to get
the basic idea. See that on the left? The more connections there are,
the more networked communication there is between neurons, the fewer
the connections there are, the less communication between neurons.

Now,
obviously the one on the left is better and the one on the right
worse, right?

No,
not necessarily. It depends on what brain function we're talking
about for that particular group of neurons. If that more densely
connected group on the left happens to be in a region of your brain that's integral for "processing" math equations (which is not actually a single region, but a
network of regions), then it's a good thing. If it happens to be in
a region of your brain (again, as part of a network) creating really negative self-appraisal and
really beating yourself up self-dialog, then it's decidedly not such
a good thing. A group of neurons all well interconnected might be
responsible for a good memory, or it might be responsible for a bad
memory. It might be responsible for a positive aspect of
your life or
an negative aspect. It might be for an area that helps regulate
emotions or areas and networks for generating negative or
inappropriate emotions. And much, much so on.

And
see where it says "stimulated" and "unstimulated"?
Neither of those are necessarily good or bad either. There can be
"good" stimulation or "bad or unwanted"
stimulation. And the stimulation can come from your external
environment or from your own inner thoughts and perceptions.

And
how these connections grow or prune back is based on one of the great
fundamentals of neuroplasticity - "neurons that fire together,
wire together". In other words, the more that particular group
of neurons is "stimulated" - and thus stimulating neurons
firing - the more they'll seek out those connected axons and
dendrites and synaptic connections and "wire together". And
again, this can be for good or bad. If it's a good skill we're
learning (a new piano piece for example), that's a great thing. If it
happens to be in parts of our fear or emotional pain circuitry that's going to create negative behaviours or reactions to life events, then
it could well be a bad thing.

And
just to remind you, at any one time in your brain you'll have as many
as one hundred and fifty to two hundred trillion connections
like that. And they are never, ever static. They are breaking down,
reforming and "reaching out" all the time and can happen in
split second time frames as you're thinking. Yes, a
single thought can cause connections to re-organize themselves. This
is really, really important to bear in mind.

Okay,
that's at the "neighbour to neighbour" level of
neuroplastic connection building.

As
we saw in Neuroanatomy 101, we also have "long distance wiring"
and a "wiring harnesses" that look like this:

These
are "high traffic" and "long distance" axon
bundles that carry major "communication" loads between
major regions (the "connectome"
that I first introduced in Neuroanatomy 101).

Many
perform relatively mundane tasks like whisking data from your eyes to
your various "image processing" centres in the brain
(mostly at the back in the occitipital lobe) and all kinds of other
boring tasks involved in getting your body and self through life. But
a good deal of them are involved in our emotional responses and
regulation, the connections that make up our higher human
intelligence and all the really important stuff involved in making us
human and in our behaviours in the world. These are the
"trunk lines" that are chiefly of interest to us.

The
"connectome" has been the subject of some breathtaking
research in the past several years and some very exciting discoveries
have been made. And some of these findings are strongly indicating
that many of these "trunk lines" appear to be heavily
implicated in all the major disorders from schizophrenia to major
depressive disorder to ADD and much so on.

These
major communication channels as well are subject to neuroplasticity
albeit under somewhat different principles than what we saw with
"local" wiring at the synaptic level. The major wiring can
change and adapt as well but at a much slower pace. When we hear some
sort of behaviour or reaction is "hard wired" in, it is
more in these major trunk lines that we are talking about. But that
does not mean that certain key "highways" cannot be
changed, it just means that it takes more time.

Now,
to further understand the implications and meaning of this to change
who you are and all those reactions, emotions and habits you want to
rid yourself of, we'll have to look more at brain regions and what
they do and how they work together.

But
for now I hope you have at least a bit of an idea of what
neuroplasticity is and what's going on in that noggin of yours. There
will be several other pieces in a series on neuroplasticity so we can
learn better how to use this amazing brain function to heal our
selves and our minds, but in time.

This
is but the first of a series of many posts on neuroplasticity and how
to utilize it. Please stay tuned.

Brief
Overview of Sources:

I've
many sources for my studies of neuroplasticity, but none more
important than the book that introduced me to it, the literally life
changing The
Brain that Changes Itself.

And
many posts by Yale University's Dr
Jon Lieff such
as this excellent primer
on neuroplasticity.
Dr Lieff's blog is considered one of the top sources for neuroscience
on the Internet.

Plus
the dozens and dozens of research papers I come across or am
introduced to by one of my trusted personal sources.

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7 comments:

I really wonder if your attempting the impossible, I have found myself becoming increasingly critical to the point of irritation at the quality of much of the output of neuroscience and I'm not alone. A search for neurotwaddle, neurobollocks, neurotrash, etc will point you to lots of highly critical reviews of the current state of neuroscience, some from neuroscientists themselves. Huge sums of money have been invested in researching the biological basis of human thoughts feelings and behaviour yet if you look at how much of this has lead to anything of use it should ring warning bells. Neuroplasticity is interesting, it is one of the ways in which the brain responds to its environment, and yes we see synapses being changes, but not everything happens at the synapses a nerve is covered with chemo-receptors and can interconnect with 10,000 others each one of these attempting to alter the nerves action potential. When it fires, that's all it does, they don't really operate as wires, each ones a switch the only information each nerve transmits is the fact its fired. Currently we don't even have a clear idea of all the chemicals that impact on nerve function even a single synapse may use several neurotransmitters and have a range of different types of receptors. I have yet to see any well reasoned attempt to try to convert the biology we are aware of into an understanding of though, feeling and behaviour. Clearly mind is a product of our biology but making sense of how this works is beyond us.I don't want to put you off, I'm actually interested in how you will approach this issue, I just hope you realise what your taking on and I don't think you'll get much help from neuroscience. Your a brave man/woman, I wouldn't attempt this but maybe this will be your opus, it would be a grand work indeed.

I found this helpful. Most discussions on nsuroplasticity I've read are more difficult to grasp. And I agree nsuroplasticity is the most important - and very doable- factor in healing. Not nearly as discussed in popular in media as chemical cures, yet much more effective and healthy in the long run. Thank you for sharing this information in a digestible way!

About Me

I study neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, human behaviour and certain neuropsychiatric disorders. I am currently working on a book summarizing much of what I believe are the most relevant brain abnormalities involved in neuropsychiatric disorders along with my own views and considerable insights.

Aside from that, I continue to pursue photography. Currently, I am working on a project involving female faces and various shapes and colours that I find interesting. Some of my previous photography is up on my website. Only a tiny fraction is up on the site (because of <ahem> "hard drive issues") but it gives some idea of what I do with a camera and the right lenses.

These two pursuits, along with great interests in music, cooking and baking, looking after Mrs Bean (and she after me) and following various sports (particularly baseball) keeps me more than busy enough.